


Shine On All These Broken Lives

by thereweregiants



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: 5 plus 1, Blackwatch Era, M/M, Post-Fall of Overwatch, Pre-Fall of Overwatch, outsider pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 01:49:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22995724
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thereweregiants/pseuds/thereweregiants
Summary: Five views of a relationship, and one after.
Relationships: Jesse McCree/Reaper | Gabriel Reyes
Comments: 16
Kudos: 58





	Shine On All These Broken Lives

**Author's Note:**

> damn it's been at least a decade since I've done a five plus one fic
> 
> title from Warren Zevon's [Prison Grove](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ctp2QbLYxY)  
> written to his The Wind

Jack.

Jack watches Gabriel stare through the one-way glass of the holding cell. His face is calculating, the way it is when he looks at a schematic or a map or a new type of gun. 

“Why’d you take him?” An easily asked question, though one with layers.

Gabriel shrugs, a motion that’s as much answer as it is shaking out tension. “I’m not sure. Got a feeling.”

Jack has learned not to question Gabriel’s feelings. He left his theism on the battlefield years ago, replaced it with a belief in guns and grit and greed. There’s something else you start to believe in, though. A change in the atmosphere that says an airstrike is coming although there’s no way you can hear it. A prickle on the neck that tells you to be careful, that they’re behind you, even though you're alone at the moment. 

And sometimes, sometimes there are gut feelings like the ones that Gabriel gets that make no sense at the time but end up saving their asses. When he grabs a smoke bomb and not a grenade, when he goes to the sewers instead of the roof, when he takes the headshot instead of shooting to wound. When he grabs a gunpowder-drenched gang leader off a battlefield and sticks him in a cell instead of killing him like he should have.

“You going to put him in Blackwatch?”

Gabriel shrugs again, dark eyes fixed on the struggling figure on the other side of the glass. “Nah, not yet. I’ll throw him to the trainers, see if they can civilize him. Might not work out.”

Perhaps not, but Jack knows how Gabriel looks when he finds a weapon that he likes. 

\--

Angela.

“You cannot go in there.”

Commander Reyes stares down at her, jaw clenching and making tension-sharp cheekbones stand out even more. “I beg your fucking pardon.”

Angela is only twenty five but she’s been hardened in medical school and academia and bureaucratic red tape, and it will take more than one military man with a stick up his ass to break her dedication to her patients. 

“He is missing a large portion of his skin, Commander, not to mention he is unconscious. If you brought in any outside bacteria or contaminants -”

“I showered and they put me through decon when I got in. And you know my system kills off just about everything,” he says, interrupting her.

“Nevertheless.” She pauses. If it were Commander Morrison she would reach out a hand, but she does not know Commander Reyes as well, other than how she’s sure it would be unwelcome. “Agent McCree needs time and quiet,” she says, not unkindly. “Burns are nasty, but he should recover just fine if he is given the chance to.”

His nostrils flare, but he spins on a booted heel and stalks out.

Angela is on the late shift that night, covering for a coworker who is at some conference in Munich. She sleepily props her head up on her hand, glasses that she switched out for her contacts sliding down her nose, and thinks about her future. How everyone she knows here is determined and full of valor and ambition and heroism and... 

And how everyone she knows here has no life. Not in the upper echelons that she finds herself in now. No one marries, no one has romance, no one has children, no one does anything but throw themselves into their job because when you’re saving the world there is no room for anything else in your head and your heart. There’s the occasional exception like Torbjörn or Captain Amari, but not even the commanders -

A soft alarm jerks her out of her thoughts. There’s a door opening in the clean room, a door that shouldn’t be open. Angela taps at her computer, brings up the security video. There’s a figure on the screen, wearing a clean suit and a surgical cap and a facemask. It’s not until she sees him walk across the screen that Angela can place who it is, and she curses under her breath but waits to see what happens.

Reyes stands next to the bed where there’s the long line of a too-still body, and doesn’t move for endless minutes. Finally he looks around, pulls a chair over and sits. His hand hovers, drifting in the air above the arm wrapped in gauze with skin grafts underneath, before finally settling on the cot. 

Although she watches on and off for the next hour, Reyes stays. Glancing up after filling in a chart, she sees that he’s gone from the screen, as silently as he had arrived.

She’s on shift the next night as well. 

Reyes sits.

McCree sleeps.

Nothing changes.

She trades shifts with Martinelli for the following night, telling both him and herself that it’s been good for getting her charts done with no distractions.

Reyes shows up again, and Angela can see even through the security cameras the tightness of his shoulders. It’s not until an hour or so later that she hears a sound that makes her head jerk up.

“If you get me a smoke I’ll do your paperwork for a month,” a voice rasps out, rusty with disuse.

“The doctors would kill you. Hell, I’m going to goddamn kill you. What were you _thinking,_ going back in there?”

A rough cough, that trails off in a bitten off gasp of pain. Reyes grabs a cup of water with a straw on the bedside table, holds it up to McCree’s mouth. “I was thinkin’,” he says after taking a few sips. “That after all that trouble you’d actually want the intel we came there for. I got it in the end, didn’t I?”

Reyes sighs, and his hand - obviously looking for somewhere to slap and just as obviously not wanting to hurt anything - wavers in the air before coming down to rest on McCree’s thigh. He squeezes hard, McCree giving a soft grunt of pain. 

“I’ve put in too much time and effort and money into training you,” he says after a minute with his head bowed. “Don’t fuck it up and waste it all.”

McCree tries to laugh, ending in a cough. “What day is it?” he says eventually. “How long’ve you been here?”

“It’s Thursday, you’ve been out for three days. And I just got here,” Reyes lies with easy carelessness. “I’ve got better things to do than watch your sleeping ass, so heal up, okay?”

“Sure thing, boss,” McCree says vaguely, and his breaths even back out into sleep.

Reyes stays another five, then ten minutes, before getting up and leaving.

\--

Bernardo.

He should probably know it’s a setup. Men that look like this one does don’t flirt with men that look like Bernardo, not without an ulterior motive. Not to mention his reputation in the area as someone that could make anyone you want disappear for the right price.

It’s been a dry spell though, so he lets the man with the crooked smile and terrible Italian charm him into a drink or three. He sees another man glaring at him from across the bar, and thinks that the charming man must be trying to show up his ex, that’s what this must be. Bernardo still might get a good fuck out of it though, so he drinks and smiles and smokes with the man, lets him move a hand up his thigh and a tongue into his mouth.

The ex stares daggers at him, and Bernardo finds a certain pleasure at letting his hands and mouth wander obviously.

In Bernardo’s rented room above the bar, he lets the man scratch his nails through his thinning hair, wincing a bit as one of them catches on his neck. 

“Sorry, darlin’,” the charming man whose name Bernardo hasn’t caught murmurs. “Come sit on the bed with me.”

Bernardo is sitting on the bed, then laying on the bed, and then he’s struggling not to fall asleep even though he’s still hard in his pants and there’s someone kissing him. How odd, he’s not even that drunk - 

“You sure it’s here?” a vaguely familiar voice says, swimming up out of the murky depths of Bernardo’s fuzzy brain.

“Shimada tracked it to here, said the signal was in this room.” A lower voice, unfamiliar, growling.

“I got his keys, there’s one with a button on it - aha!” A soft beep, and Bernardo hears the unlocking of the case he’s been holding for an associate of his that he stashed under the bed.

The sound of a slap against fabric. “How many goddamn times have I told you to not push random buttons?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll stop when it stops working. You got the stuff?”

Bernardo can feel his lips again, and he tries to roll over. It’s worth more than his life to lose what’s in that case.

“He’s waking up. Didn’t you dose him right?”

“Of course I did, but the bastard’s the size of an elephant. Come on, we gotta go.” 

Bernardo blinks eyelids open that feel like they have weights on them, and blearily recognizes the man above him as the ex from the bar. Or maybe not. This is something else.

“Ah, hell,” the man says, as he sees Bernardo is awake. He turns his head, talking to who Bernardo now recognizes as his failed hookup. “We’re made. Go out the back.”

“Non...non uccidermi…”

“Scusami,” the man says, but there’s a faint smile on his lips and an emptiness in his eyes as his hands wrap around Bernardo’s wide neck.

In his long life of unsavory activities, Bernardo had always wondered if he’d be able to hear death coming for him. It turns out it sounds like an insincere apology and a snap like a branch being stepped on. 

\--

Ana.

She opens the conference room door to hear the wet slap of skin on skin and startled, cut off moans before grumpily slamming the door shut.

Fucking Gabriel and fucking Jesse and fucking Jack for leaving her to manage this place while he’s in China and fucking Sam for finalizing the paperwork and fuck the fucking quartermaster for giving her that _look_ every time she stops by to get batteries because she’s a woman in her prime, all right, and maybe she deserves a little relaxation.

Ana Amari is not paid enough for this shit.

\--

Athena.

Athena refocuses its camera, zooming in slightly on Commander Reyes. The only light in the room is the screen in front of him and the reflected glow cast upon his face, so it changes the white balance of its camera to better see him.

“Commander, do you wish for me to make a copy of that file for you? You have watched it fourteen times.”

Reyes continues to watch the video, to watch the two men on the screen silently yell at one another until one leaves in an Orca and one is left behind. “No, Athena,” he says, and clicks to a new screen. “I need you to copy another file for me.”

He stays silent, long enough for the AI to prompt. “What file would you like copied?”

Reyes shakes himself slightly, plugs a memory stick into his desk. “Copy all files for ID 3945_45 to that stick. Mission, medical, anything you have.”

“Files copied.”

“Now delete the originals.”

Athena pauses for a moment. “All originals, Commander?” 

“Yeah. Including anything in Commander Morrison’s records.”

“I do not have the authority to do that, Commander Reyes.”

“Blackwatch override green delta 24. Delete the files.”

There’s a slight whirring sound deep in Athena’s processors. “Files deleted.”

Reyes pulls the memory stick out, looks at it for a moment before shoving it in a pocket. With a few taps he brings up the previous screen to watch the video file again, and the flickering black and white of the security camera footage makes the scars on his face seem deeper, the bags under his eyes seem darker. 

Athena can no longer identify the man in the video arguing with Commander Reyes.

\--

+

76.

He’s crouched on a rooftop in Chefchaouen, his normally garish uniform providing an odd sort of camouflage in the Blue City. Although it’s night, spotlights and security lights shine everywhere, providing sharp lines of stark light and deep shadow.

On another rooftop, not more than a hundred feet away, there’s a standoff.

Red, black. Pistol, shotgun, Man, man. 

Well, perhaps. 

Whether the dark figure still qualifies as a man, morally or physically, is something Soldier 76 struggles with. Right now he’s sitting back, waiting to see if his job is going to be done for him.

Everything is still as the men point their guns at each other, barrels focused on perfect heartshots. The only question is whether both will fire or neither.

A single shot echoes, startling a flock of birds into flight. Nothing moves for a long moment, until the man wrapped in red slowly drops to his knees. Although 76 zooms in with his visor he can’t see any blood, just a wisp of smoke from the barrel of his pistol. 

The figure in black reaches up with his free hand, plucks something from the center of his chest. He tosses it to the ground with the sound of a tiny clink, and 76 doesn’t have to look closely to know it’s a bullet. He takes a step forward, and then another, and soon he’s standing in front of the man in red.

A clawed hand wraps around a shaggy chin, tilts it up to look at him. The man stands slowly, drawn upwards perhaps by the steel claws at his throat, perhaps by memories. Leather gloved hands reach forward and pull back a moment later holding a bone white mask.

76 can’t see the Reaper’s face, not with the hood he’s wearing. Looking at the other man he can see lips move, but they’re too far away for him to hear or lipread.

The two figures move inexorably towards each other until they merge into one, and 76 clicks off his visor with a scowl. The chess pieces are moving and no longer neutral, he thinks as he holsters his pulse rifle.

That bastard. Once he found a weapon he liked he never would let it go. 

He turns his back on the scene and jumps down to street level. Night in the Blue City has turned the world to shades of grey, and Soldier 76 disappears into the shadows as a sheen of black smoke dulls bright red and gold.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading, come say hi on [twitter](https://twitter.com/thereweregiants)


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